The title of a new documentary showing how the big social media companies use psychology for surveillance to manipulate users to unconsciously accept programming and buy products. It’s an important topic but fails in that the makers did not use any of the persuasive techniques the social media companies use to get their own points across. It’s just dry, boring fact after fact that lost my interest a third of the way through. At one point they did try a…
“Arendt anticipated the destructive potential of behaviorism decades ago when she lamented the devolution of our conception of ‘thought’ to something that is accomplished by a ‘brain’ and is therefore transferable to ‘electronic instruments’: The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were…
Fairness is rapidly collapsing due largely to the asymmetric advantages AI-enabled behavioral extraction and manipulation grant to their masters. If not subordinated to wise, pro-human governance, surveillance capitalism will be the end of any individual self-direction and privacy.
Open access book by Giorgio Griziotti is here. Technical book for you techies. The blurb: “Technological change is ridden with conflicts, bifurcations and unexpected developments. Neurocapitalism takes us on an extraordinarily original journey through the effects that cutting-edge technology has on cultural, anthropological, socio-economic and political dynamics. Today, neurocapitalism shapes the technological production of the commons, transforming them into tools for commercialization, automatic control, and crisis management. But all is not lost: in highlighting the growing role of General Intellect’s…
Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine, forecasts virtual reality (VR) becoming our primary social environment within five years. VR experiences will be increasingly interactive (physically and socially). Our brains will process VR sensations as real. The price of this novelty is all your data, historical and biometric, and with that will come more advertising than ever. What is the beginning of a new dimension of fun, will be the end of privacy. AI more advanced than what keeps people…
AI system can isolate individuals’ voices from other environmental noise, including other voices. Such a system has many potential uses, both benign and nefarious. The ability is rapidly improving to untangle signals from noise and identify which signals are from which sources. The approach should be able to apply to other kinds of signals too, not only sounds. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151268-an-ai-has-learned-how-to-pick-a-single-voice-out-of-a-crowd/